YOU know that someone is taking the Commonwealth Games seriously when they lose two stone to make sure they secure their spot in the team. Zach Courtney loves his food but the Edinburgh weightlifter committed to losing the weight because he knew that gave him the best chance of gaining selection for Team Scotland and heading to the Gold Coast.
“I like to eat, that’s my thing,” he said. “Eating healthy is all right but it’s kind of boring. I’m from Dalkeith and the Indian up the road is the best Indian ever so we’ve got a family tradition of going up there every Sunday. I’m usually pretty strict about what I have though.”
An injury last year, caused by falling down stairs on a night out, resulted in the 23-year-old being unable to even do a bodyweight squat and leaving his Games selection in doubt so he is thrilled and surprised.
But the -105kg lifter has performed impressively this year, doing enough to ensure he was one of the four weightlifters named in team Scotland last month.
“I am really, really happy I got selected,” he said. “Throughout the year, I wasn’t sure I would get selected but after making the team I’m ecstatic. The last few months have been very nerve-wracking. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and thinking about what I could have done better, what I could have done worse. But I’m pretty happy with how the year panned out.”
When Courtney was a child, he dreamt of competing in the Commonwealth Games – but not as a weightlifter. He was one of the top junior swimmers in Britain and for a prolonged period, he assumed that would be the sport that would bring him accolades. However, a twist of fate resulted in him pursuing success in an entirely different discipline.
“I was a silver medallist at the British Age-Group Championships when I was about 13 and I always aspired to go to a Commie Games,” he said. “But I fell out of love with swimming and I didn’t know what I was going to do.
“I used to do a wee bit of strength conditioning with a PE teacher at school for my swimming and then I realised I was quite strong so I searched for about two years trying to find a weightlifting coach. In 2008, weightlifting wasn’t really a big participant sport in Scotland and I actually knew a guy called David Leith who now works with British Curling but at the time was working as a gym attendant, and I saw in one of the papers that he had coached a boy with tourettes to a world powerlifting championships. So I asked him if he wanted to coach me for weightlifting, he said yeah. That was it, he has been coaching me ever since.”
Courtney missed out on selection for Glasgow 2014 and so the Scottish under-23 record holder put everything into giving himself the best opportunity to reach this Games, including spending £2500 to go to the Commonwealth Championships in the Gold Coast in September.
However, having spent so much on the trip, the competition did not go quite the way he hoped.
“It was a bit of a sham really," he said. "I had been lifting really well all year, I’d had great progression through every competition and I was expecting to do a big total when I was out there. But there was a state funeral on the day so my weight class got put back so I didn’t start lifting until 11 o’clock at night and didn’t start my second part untill 1 in the morning. I was dead because I was still jet-lagged. It was really frustrating because I'd spent three months prioritising training over everything and then I found out I’m lifting at 11 o’clock."
Courtney came ninth, but there was an upside.
"It’s just one of those things but it maybe helps me in my preparations for the Commonwealth Games to get used to things not going to plan," he said. "It helped my mental toughness, definitely. But I felt like I could have been higher on the Commonwealth ranking."
The trip gave him a taste of what the Commonwealth Games will be like but before he begins his final preparations, he has one important duty to fulfill: taking his mum to Disneyland Paris as a Christmas present.
“My mum is the biggest Disney nut you’ll ever meet. We go to Disneyworld every year and our house is literally full of Disney stuff, it’s horrendous,” he said.
So if Courtney returns from Gold Coast with a medal, will she make a space on the mantelpiece amongst her Disney memorabilia?
“Oh, I really don’t know about that,” he says.
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